Currents

In December 2001 workers took over the Brukman clothing factory in central Buenos Aires in an effort to preserve their livelihoods. Having survived two eviction orders, fended off countless police menaces and amassed an order book of around 4,000 new suits and garments, this year they were eventually ousted by overwhelming brute force.

In the early hours one night last April 300 police officers stormed the factory and enclosed the block around it with a high metal barrier. Three days later, buoyed by previous victories over the law with thousands of supporters fervently backing them, some of the factory's seamstresses breached the fence with the vague aim of seizing the factory back. Absolute mayhem ensued. 'Four of us went in, then the fences collapsed and the police went crazy,' says Brukman seamstress Mathilde Adorno, who recalls walking in a daze through the panic of teargas, water cannon and bullets that followed.

Over 100 people were arrested and dozens injured that day, as street fighting fanned out across nearby streets and even into a children's hospital; the first such battles in the capital for close to a year. From being a symbol of the struggle to retain dignity and employment in Argentina's calamitous depression, the fate of Brukman had instantly become a touchstone for the entire country's future. The first round of Presidential elections was to take place within a week of the fighting - suggesting that political interests were involved in the timing of the police raid.

Purchase/Pay
Today we usually pay money when we buy goods. Purchase (from the French pourchasser) originally referred to hunting for animals and taking goods by force. The modern sense of acquiring goods by payment arrived in the late 1300s. Pay, from the same root as peace, originally meant to pacify a creditor.

Susan Watkin

Months later, the 58 Brukman workers, most of whom are women, remain locked out of the factory that is still barricaded and guarded by police. Their new base is a tent only 200 metres away, from where they manage the intricate legal and political course toward recouping a plant that has stayed dormant since being retaken by its bankrupt owners. Fearful that the sewing machines and presses may be dismantled and sold off, they also keep a constant watch on the factory's doors. For the workers, 10 of whom have had to take up alternative employment while the rest live off a special protest fund, the stand-off smacks of the absurd: 'The city government is paying 200,000 pesos every month ($70,000) for a police guard to stop the workers from working,' observes Adorno.

Neither a conservative judiciary nor the city council, however, appears keen to restore the factory to its blue-collar staff. Instead, they have aired alternatives such as providing another site for a co-operative enterprise, or doling out severance pay, but to no avail. The workers want the factory back, and are convinced that the Brukman family's debts of at least three million pesos (over one million dollars) justify expropriation by the state. The lawyers representing the Brukman family, meanwhile, characterize the workers as troublesome revolutionaries. For the moment, there seems little prospect that the tent will be taken down.

Yet even as they watch their workplace from afar and seethe at the authorities, the workers know that their struggle has contributed to fundamental changes in Argentina. Néstor Kirchner, the newly elected President, has thus far honoured his pledge to clean up the country's institutions, and television images of the Brukman skirmishes seem to have impressed him: the police chief in charge of the April raid has been removed, many departmental chiefs in the Federal Police sacked, and the judge in charge of the case replaced. The country's new Secretary of Human Rights has visited the tent, while the police guards have been ordered not to use any violence against the workers or their fellow protesters.

And Mathilde Adorno has become something of a national celebrity after joining the advance on the armed police ranks in April. 'All our colleagues were putting lemons around their eyes to counter any teargas, but I said "no thank you, my make-up will run",' she chuckles. 'Once the police started, I realized my make-up didn't matter any more.'

Ivan Briscoe

Iran on screen
Iran is making some of the most acclaimed films in the world, despite its pariah status as a totalitarian Islamist nation and member of US President Bush's 'Axis of Evil'. With their minimalist aesthetic, elemental imagery and simple plotlines, Iranian movies have taken the critical world by storm. Many recent Iranian films contain criticisms of the Iranian Government. Despite its professed eagerness for Iranian democracy, the US continues to deny visas to many of the country's top filmmakers whose art furthers democratic renewal and provides a vital window on Iran for the outside world.

Utne Reader,
September-October 2003

Plagued by gun-crime, Brazilians seek
to rid their streets of firearms

Illegal firearms go up in flames in the first-ever public burning of weapons in South America. Photo: Nicolas Watson

BRAZIL isn't at war and hasn't been since 1945. But recent research shows that deaths from firearms in Rio de Janeiro are higher than in some of the worst conflicts of recent years, including those in Sierra Leone, ex- Yugoslavia and Uganda.

And the cost of this violence? Brazil is estimated to spend 10 per cent of its national income on security. That is 5 times more than its education budget and a staggering 56 times more than the funds for the acclaimed 'Zero Hunger' campaign launched by the progressive President Lula. Violence is clearly blocking development.

Crime has changed the way Brazilians live too. One recent report estimates that in houses across the country there are now 40,000 'panic rooms' (reinforced safe rooms), gated communities have become the norm for the middle classes and some 60 firms currently compete in the bullet-proof vehicle business. The private-security business is also thriving: its employees far outnumber police.

Many choose to arm themselves. If the state cannot provide security, they reason, then they must protect their homes and families themselves. The result is a spiral of fear, a heavily armed populace and cities like Rio de Janeiro plagued by gun-crime.

But there are positive signs of a turning tide. Presenting violence as a disease, an organization called Viva Rio focuses on the gun as the carrier of that disease, and campaigns both to reduce supply and demand of firearms.

Working with the police, Viva Rio has established an innovative community policing project in one of Rio's sprawling favelas (shantytowns). Grassroots conflict mediation centres have been set up so that local disagreements between neighbours or domestic situations can be settled amicably and not with the law of the gun.

Internet centres and computer courses as well as sporting activities and micro-credit schemes all aim to provide greater opportunities for Rio's poor and vulnerable, reducing the risk that they fall into crime. Viva Rio also pressures the Brazilian Government to change the country's gun laws and produces research into gun trafficking and the powerful arms lobbies. In response, the Rio State Government has already passed tough new laws regulating gun ownership.

To help foster a culture of peace Viva Rio also organizes acts of arms destruction. The first ever public burning of weapons in South America took place this year on 12 July. Watched by thousands, almost 5,000 weapons were flattened by a steamroller or burnt in a pyre.

As well as reducing police stockpiles of confiscated weapons and putting thousands of guns permanently out of action, these acts serve as dramatic symbols of the fight for disarmament and peace and help change attitudes towards guns. During the destruction event of 12 July, members of the public were spontaneously moved to hand in firearms. These first small steps at the grassroots level may yet catalyse the Government into doing something about the scourge of violence in Brazil.

Nicholas Watson

No excuses for wife-beating
'Beating our wives and saying it is to teach them our customs is just an excuse,' says Vanuatuan Minister Wille Boedoro. This summer the Pacific island of Vanuatu began the first-ever advocacy training sessions in the region for Men Against Violence Against Women. Knox Morris, a field worker for the Vanuatu Society for Disabled People said: 'Before the training I was taught to believe that it was all right for men to beat up women, and that it was no-one else's business because of the popularly held belief that paying the bride-price for his wife entitled a man to do whatever he wanted with her. But after the training, I feel that now I can help women to understand their rights.' Men from all over the Pacific region addressed topics from domestic violence to the portrayal of women in the media. As part of the training, they made commitments to examine their own behaviour, to be positive role-models, to help victims seek support and counselling, and to speak up for women's rights even if it meant challenging their friends and work colleagues.

Pacific Women’s Network Against Violence Against Women, issue 3

Herbal hope for malaria
A vital weakness in the malaria parasite has been uncovered by the study of ancient Chinese antifever remedies. The parasite has become resistant in most parts of the world to the most common anti-malarial drug, chloroquine. Derived from the Chinese herb qinghao, or sweet wormwood (Artemis annua), the extracts - called artemisinins - have already helped millions in southeast Asia. Scientific researchers discovered how the drugs work, revealing vital information about a chink in the parasite's 'armour' - a vulnerable enzyme. From this information they hope to develop new artemisinins that work faster, in three to four days - and follow it with new drugs that exploit the malaria parasite's newly revealed weakness.

New Scientist, August 2003

"Few things are more dangerous than empires pursuing their own interest in the belief that they are doing humanity a favour."

Eric Hobsbawm, British historian, (1917 - )

The shocking report of Peru's Truth Commission

NUMBERS matter. Figures tell a story. And the figure 69,280 holds especially potent meaning for Peruvians these days. The country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has concluded its inquiries and found that this is the number of people killed or disappeared between 1980 and 2000. It is almost three times the figure previously circulated.

The report holds the Maoist guerrillas of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) responsible for 54 per cent of the deaths, and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement responsible for 1.5 per cent. The remainder fell victim to the State's armed forces, presided over by three presidents: Fernando Belaúnde (1980- 85), Alan García (1985-90) and Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000).

Everything's A-OK The US Army - which partially sponsors Children's Television Workshop, makers of Sesame Street - has been using the American kids' TV show's relentlessly cheerful theme music to torture Iraqi prisoners.

US 'psychological operations officers' intent on encouraging their captives to submit to questioning subjected them to repeated playings of the Sesame Street theme tune at earsplitting volume, according to Ryan Dilley of the BBC.

Heavy metal group Metallica were also favoured by the military as a way of breaking the will of their captives.

US 'Psyops', short for Psychological Operations, says the aim is to do this by depriving them of sleep and playing culturally offensive music. Sergeant Mark Hadsell, of Psyops, told Newsweek magazine: 'These people haven't heard heavy metal. They can't take it. If you play it for 24 hours, your brain and body functions start to slide, your train of thought slows down and your will is broken. That's when we come in and talk to them.'

Sesame Street is aired in over 120 countries. In South Africa, it features Kami, an HIV-positive muppet, to promote tolerance and understanding, and in Egypt the muppet Khokha provides a strong role model for girls.

At the same time as Psyops uses the Sesame Street theme as an instrument of torture, the US State Department has praised the kids' show, which promotes early learning and co-operation amongst young children, as turning the tide of anti- Americanism by showing the US at its best.

The Iraqis may disagree.

Just to get a sense of scale: Pinochet's coup in Chile claimed around 3,000 lives at the hands of the State; Argentina's military dictatorship was responsible for some 30,000 disappearances. Appalling, but less than half Peru's total loss. Yet Peru's 'disappeared' aroused little international interest at the time and even now, strangely, gain little publicity.

Or not so strangely. Let's look at those statistics. Three out of every four victims in Peru were Quechua speakers, members of the country's biggest indigenous community. Some 69 per cent only had primary education; most of the victims, 79 per cent, lived in rural areas. And 40 per cent came from just one department, Ayacucho - one of the three most impoverished in the country. Unlike many of their Argentinean or Chilean counterparts most were not urban, not educated, not Spanish-speaking nor white.

For 22 months the Commission collected evidence from more than 16,000 people in 530 remote parts of Peru and undertook exhumations of mass graves and burial sites. Delivering the report to current President Alejandro Toledo at the end of August, Commission Chair Salomón Lerner did not mince his words: 'The story that is told here talks about us, about what we were and what we must stop being.'

What happens now is uncertain: the Peruvian judiciary must now determine if the officials involved are criminally responsible. The names of 120 people - both military and civilian - are to be presented in a sealed document to the Attorney General's office.

Of the former three presidents implicated, Belaúnde is dead and Fujimori in hiding in Japan. But Alan García, despite having left office under a cloud of criminal corruption charges in 1995, currently heads the main APRA opposition party.

Critics have said that the Commission - which had international observers and monitors - has been too harsh on the State. But the Commission had nothing but condemnation for Sendero Luminoso, who it said 'scorned the value of life, and denied human rights'. The report says the movement 'used extreme violence and unusual maliciousness that included torture and excessive cruelty as forms of punishing or setting examples to intimidate the population that it sought to control'.

Sendero Luminoso has been decapitated, its leader Abimael Guzmán is behind bars. But that should not be cause for complacency. It is widely accepted that Ayacucho, with its poverty, deprivation and neglect was a breeding ground for insurgency. And as the Peruvian weekly Caretas points out: 'The sad - and dangerous - thing is that this situation has not changed substantially since 1980, and shows no sign of changing.'

The report leaves Peruvians with much to dwell on. The Truth Commission's website puts it this way: 'A country that forgets its history is condemned to repeat it. If you lived it, you must not forget it. If you did not live it, you must know what happened.'

New Internationalist reports on issues of world poverty and inequality. We focus attention on the unjust relationship between the powerful and the powerless worldwide in the fight for global justice. More about our work